May 7th this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” speech in Cambridge, England. There were some scattered commemorations. Roger Kimball, writing in the February 1994 issue of The New Criterion, had already noted the naïveté and incoherence of Snow’s arguments, yet allowed that there was a grain of truth in them: “For there is an ingredient of irrationalism in Western culture that regularly manifests itself in anti-scientific biases of one sort or another. Certain varieties of romanticism belong here.”
That qualifier is well placed: “Certain varieties.” Romanticism, for all its emphasis on sensation over ratiocination, on heart over head, on the felt over the observed, shares a part of the human imagination with science. That imaginative region, properly stimulated, can inspire either a hypothesis or a sonnet equally well. Indeed, there is an entire literary genre, though admittedly it is lowbrow, in which the scientific and the romantic are yoked together: science fiction. Kingsley Amis, in his 1960 survey of the genre, New Maps of Hell, wrote that science fiction’s best productions “arouse wonder, terror, and excitement.” (I note in passing that Amis’s book was based on some lectures he had given at Princeton in the spring of 1959, within a few days of C. P. Snow’s much inferior Cambridge presentation.)
Wonder, terror, and excitement.
Wonder, terror, and excitement. These emotions come upon the scientific enquirer when he stands at the edge of the known, peering into the unknown.